Is your software holding you back?

We run Fake Brains on AccountScout.

Not as a demo, and not partially. Our billing and accounts receivable live in it. So does our CRM. So does our advertiser email. Our own customers pay us through the same Advertiser Portal we sell to publishers as an add-on. QuickBooks handles payroll, accounts payable, and the general ledger alongside it.

That is not a marketing position. It is the most reliable way we have found to discover what is wrong with our own product, because we hit the problems on the same afternoon our customers do.

The tell is always a workaround

A while back one of us walked past a colleague's desk and found them holding a phone up to their monitor.

They had photographed a completed vendor bill so they could see it on the phone screen while typing a nearly identical one into the accounting software. The software only allowed one window at a time, and comparing two records meant either memorising the first or leaving the screen. So they solved it the way people always solve it — with equipment the software could not take away from them.

Nobody had filed a complaint about this. There was no ticket. It had simply been absorbed into the job.

That is what makes workarounds worth hunting for. People are resourceful, and resourcefulness hides cost. The photographed screen, the private spreadsheet, the sticky note taped to the monitor, the printout someone keeps "just in case" — each one is a person paying, in their own time, for something the software should have done.

Go looking for them. Walk the office and ask what people do that the system does not know about. You will find more than you expect, and you will find the real backlog.

What we changed because of it

In AccountScout, virtually every screen can be opened multiple times at once — the same invoice, the same advertiser, the same order, the same report, side by side. That capability exists because comparing two records is not an edge case. It is Tuesday.

It sounds like a small thing. It is the difference between a task taking twenty seconds and a task requiring a second device.

The second gap: results that never reach anyone

The other thing running our own business surfaced was email.

Like a lot of publishers, we send to prospects and advertisers, and we use a dedicated tool to design and send. The composing is genuinely the easy part. The hard parts are building the right list and getting the results somewhere they matter.

Without an integration, that means exporting a CSV, uploading it, and then — the expensive bit — leaving the results inside the marketing tool. Someone checks the numbers every few days. There is a gap between what that person sees and what the sales team knows. The advertiser who opened the campaign three times and clicked twice never gets a call, because nobody whose job it is to call them ever saw it.

So we built the integration into AccountScout's email marketing rather than beside it. Lists get segmented directly from the advertiser record — dormant accounts, past advertisers in a category, prospects by industry — without maintaining the same data in two places. Campaign results come back into the same record, so a rep sees engagement on the account they are about to call.

We wanted that because we needed it ourselves. That is usually how it goes.

The question worth asking

The test we keep coming back to is not "does the software have the features?" It is:

Could we do more without it than with it?

If any part of your operation would move faster if the system disappeared tomorrow, that part of the system is a tax rather than an asset. Look for the workarounds; they will tell you which part.

If your current publishing software cannot talk to the tools your team already relies on, it is probably limiting more than you have measured. We would rather you found that out by walking your own office than by reading a vendor's blog — but the walk is worth taking either way.